More and more students aim to pursue a PhD. I did mine at a later age, in my own time. But imagine starting a doctorate. You work for years on a single project, often with a great deal of autonomy, yet at the same time within a relationship in which one person has enormous influence over your future. That one person is your supervisor. And that turns out to be both the system’s strength and its vulnerability.

In recent years, stories have surfaced regularly, for example. Testimonies about inappropriate behaviour, abuse of power, and bullying. The stories are often harrowing. But as is often the case with such reports, they are quickly read as exceptions. Extreme cases or bad apples. The rest is not like that. And while I myself also had good experiences and know others who were fortunate, it turns out this really does happen far more often.

That is what a new study by Li Zheng in the British Educational Research Journal shows. Based on data from more than 6,000 doctoral students, more than one in five report having been bullied during their trajectory. About the same number report discrimination. And in almost half of the cases (48%), the supervisor is the perpetrator. Note that the data are based on self-reports and show only correlations. But the figures are, in my view, too large to simply dismiss.

The consequences are also significant. Students who experience bullying or discrimination are clearly less satisfied with their trajectory and are less positive about their job prospects. In the case of bullying, you even see that the likelihood of someone wanting to remain in research decreases. In other words, the system pushes people out.

You can quickly look for individual explanations. Poor supervision. Personal conflicts. Bad luck. But that becomes harder when you see the same figures emerging across 34 countries. Then it becomes less about individuals and more about how the system is organised.

And that system has several characteristics that make it vulnerable, something that also became apparent in the Pano broadcast. Think of the strong dependency relationship between supervisor and doctoral student. But also the unclear boundaries between training and work, incentives that reward publications and output but not necessarily good mentorship. And there is often limited external oversight.

It is also striking what does not work. University support around mental well-being does have a positive effect on satisfaction, but barely mitigates the negative impact of bullying or discrimination. This suggests that you cannot solve a structural problem with individual support alone.

That makes this study both unsettling and recognisable. Unsettling, because the scale is larger than we would like to believe. Recognisable, because it fits into a broader pattern that has been visible for some time to those willing to look.

The question, then, is not so much whether this problem exists. We should really have moved beyond that stage. The question is what we do about it. And above all, whether we continue to think in terms of incidents and support, or dare to look at the way the system itself makes these situations possible.